Thoughts, reviews, rants, laments, and general chatting about the wonderful world(s) of comic books.

May 22, 2015

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 87: Miracleman #5, July 2014

Back to Miracleman, and more and more now the links between it and Supreme are blatant. Though I kind of wonder if that's a retroactive blatancy. I don't think (I don't know for sure) that the original Eclipse reprints included old Marvelman strips, but the juxtaposition of them in the Marvel reprints makes for an interesting contrast to the old-style stories that are inserted into each issue of Supreme. After the revelation of Miracleman's origin, reading the reprinted Marvelman stories at the back of each issue is like having a glimpse into the history that Mike Moran is currently discovering to be false. In Supreme, the flashbacks are filling in a truth, in that they are filling in "new" Supreme's back story, in Miracleman, the flashbacks are revealing a lie. There's an interesting moment in this particular issue in which we get a story of Young Miracleman entitled "1957." YM flies to Pluto to get some jewels to impress a young lady, but the jewels melt upon YM's return to Earth. Here's the thing, though: this adventure is a fashioned memory. Neither of the surviving members of the Miracleman Family feature in it, so it's strange to have a flashback to a manufactured memory of a character who is, ostensibly, dead. I wonder whether or not this is foreshadowing something to do with Young Miracleman.

Miracleman's associate, Evelyn Cream, is a neat addition to the story. Originally hired to assassinate Mike Moran, Cream instead allies himself with Miracleman, which I did not see coming. I'm interested in Cream's back story, though I've no idea if one will ever be fleshed out for him. How did he get sapphire teeth? And what's it like to eat with a mouthful of jewelery?

I've not much else to say about this issue. It's interesting to see Gargunza as a villain in both "reality" and the reprinted adventures, though something tells me he's going to be much creepier and disturbing in Moore's revision of him. Back tomorrow with another installment of "The Red King Syndrome." See you then.